Using an IR remote with your Arduino

If you’ve ever needed a short-range remote control for a project, [firestorm] is here to help you out. He put up a great tutorial on using an IR remote to do just about anything with everyone’s favorite microcontroller platform.

[firestorm] used the Arduino IRremote library to decode the button presses on his remote. After uploading the IR receive demo included in the library, the Arduino spit out hex codes of what the IR receiver was seeing. [firestorm] wrote these down, and was able to program his Arduino to respond to each individual button press.

After figuring out the IR codes for his remote, [firestorm] threw a shift register into his bread board and attached a seven-segment LED. Since [firestorm] knows the codes for the number buttons on his remote, it’s very easy to have the LED display flash a number when the corresponding button on the remote is pressed.

A single seven-segment display might not be extremely useful, but with [firestorm]’s tutorial, it’s easy to give your Arduino some remote control capabilities with a simple IR receiver. Not bad for a few dollars in parts.

Someone needs to make an IR library that doesn’t disable functionality of the board. Haven’t looked through this particular library too much, but I notice it is using the timer + interrupts, which tends to block PWM functionality on some of the pins.